ABSTRACT
I write this paper as a sociologist/criminologist with an academic interest in business deviance and corporate crime and not as a lawyer or legal scholar.1 The central thread in my work is that of deviance and crime in organizations or ‘organizational crime’.2 This assumes that in some way the firm`s institutional context and culture shape an environment that encourages, colludes or is culpably blind to law-breaking. This conceptual perspective does not sit easily with the law and with many lawyers, as both tend to be rooted in a rather narrow individualism; but also not with those social scientists and philosophers who would argue that organizations do not exist outside of the perceptions and actions of individuals. In a theoretical sense the latter are right but then they ignore the social nature of collective behaviour. When, for example, armies of millions of men sweep across countries, each individual soldier has at one level to comply in some way. Yet the military institution has proved remarkably successful at swiftly shaping individual citizens into large and obedient units that assault beaches, attack towns and jump out of aircraft into enemy territory. There is little evidence that before they assault the beach the soldiers dally to debate if the army they are fighting for really exists or if the shells exploding dangerously close to their vessel are being fired solely by individuals rather than by the armed forces of the enemy. It is equally shortsighted to think of decision-making at the top of a major corporation as that of ‘individuals’; the executives have been groomed in the corporate culture and have been selected and shaped to function as a unit that works in the best interests of the company.
